Rep. Dan Crenshaw on Tuesday said that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is lying about detained migrants being forced to drink out of toilets in a deliberate effort to mislead the public.
Crenshaw, a Texas Republican, said during an appearance on Fox News that the New York Democrat’s goal was to effectively eliminate America’s borders. He said that the entire Democratic Party has cynically exacerbated the immigration crisis as part of the same “open borders” agenda.
“She’s getting bolder with her lies on this,” Crenshaw said. “People like AOC are operating off of a false premise and deliberately designed to misinform the American people for her own political ends. Remember, first there was no crisis at all. Then, it was a manufactured crisis. Then, was a crisis completely created by Trump. Then, there were concentration camps. Then, people are Nazis.”
Top Democrats, including House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, in January accused President Donald Trump of manufacturing a crisis at the southern border. In an April town hall, Ocasio-Cortez went as far as to blame Trump for “creating undocumented populations in the United States.”
Last month, the congresswoman likened U.S. migrant detention centers to Nazi concentration camps. After touring Border Patrol detention facilities in Texas on Monday with 13 other House Democrats, she compared the Trump administration to “authoritarian regimes” and said the U.S. is undoubtedly “headed to fascism.”
“This is insanity”
Speaking to anchor Martha MacCallum, Crenshaw went on to address wild accusations Ocasio-Cortez made against Border Patrol during her tour of the detention centers.
MORE: AOC Condemns Entire Border Patrol Over Leaked Meme of Her Giving Oral Sex to Detained Migrant
“Now, she is saying that Border Patrol agents harassed her and forced migrants to drink out of toilets? This is insanity. This is not true,” Crenshaw said. “There is no one else corroborating these kinds of reports and yet she is using it to try and make her case that we shouldn’t have any enforcement and that we should have open borders. This is really dishonest behavior from a member of Congress and I honestly can’t believe it.”
After it was revealed Monday that Border Patrol agents exchanged crude jokes about her in a private Facebook group, Ocasio-Cortez condemened the entire agency as morally depraved. She also said repeatedly that agents are forcing detained migrant men, women and children to drink out of toilets – though she was vague about how she came by this information.
Ocasio-Cortez on her CBP facility tour: “These women were being told by CBP officers to drink out of the toilet. They were drinking water out of the toilet”
Reporter: “Did you see somebody actually do that?”
AOC rolls up her window and refuses to answerpic.twitter.com/eovjpDfYgk
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) July 1, 2019
Some of the other Democrats on the Border Patrol tour confirmed that detained woman told them that an agent instructed her to drink out of a toilet. But as Ocasio-Cortez has acknowledged, the toilets in the facility in question have built-in sinks, suggesting there could have been a misunderstanding. Even if the woman’s claim were true, it would not justify Ocasio-Cortez’s unqualified assertion that she knows detainees to be drinking toilet water.
Neither Ocasio-Cortez nor anyone else has provided evidence that this is happening, and a number of current and former Border Patrol officials have dismissed the idea as outlandish.
A group of Latino pastors that also toured the facilities Monday said the extreme portrayals of the conditions are false.
Dan Crenshaw explains AOC’s lies
As MaCallum noted to Crenshaw, the Department of Homeland Security’s independent watchdog reported earlier Tuesday that overcrowded and filthy conditions are widespread at detention centers along the southwest border. While Crenshaw acknowledge the report, he blamed Democrats for creating the conditions with obstructionist grandstanding.
“Let’s not forget, they fought us tooth and nail against that $4.5 million of humanitarian aid that the president needed, that DHS needed, that HHS needed, in order to better conditions at these facilities,” he said. “They fought us for months on this. They said there was no crisis. We asked for a vote in the House 17 times. They refused to do it. … AOC talks about these things, I don’t see them offering up any space in their own homes. They are not offering a better solution. They are not saying, ‘Why don’t we put them all up at a hotel?'”
Congress last week passed a bill to provide $4.5 billion in emergency border funding. But Ocasio-Cortez was one of a handful of Democrats who voted against the legislation, saying, “Throwing more money at the very organizations committing human rights abuses—and the very Administration directing these human rights abuses—is not a solution.”
MORE: CNN Host Asks Ocasio-Cortez If Obama Ran ‘Concentration Camps’
According to Crenshaw, Democrats’ ultimate goal is to leave America’s borders wide open.
“What they really want is no enforcement, this is the crux of it. They don’t talk about what the actual problem is which is tens of thousands of people coming across and overwhelming our system,” he said. “And then they have to answer the question, should we have a system at all? And they say no. Well what is the point of even having a border? Why even have custom agents at airports if we are not going to enforce any kind of management over who comes in and out of our country? They don’t want to answer these tough questions because in the end they want open borders.”
Democrats, including Pelosi of California and Schumer of New York, have denied that their party supports open borders. Last year, they offered Trump $25 million in funding for border security and Trump’s wall.
“That’s the end of that race!”
However, during the first Democratic debates last week, all the candidates proposed amnesty for undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States, with the sole exception of criminals. They also unanimously advocated giving such immigrants free healthcare.
Almost all of the candidates supported allowing undocumented immigrants to become citizens if they do not commit a crime once they enter the United States. And large majority of them called for decriminalizing illegal border crossings, which would remove the grounds for detaining illegal immigrants.
Trump responded on Twitter by triumphantly declaring the 2020 race decided.
All Democrats just raised their hands for giving millions of illegal aliens unlimited healthcare. How about taking care of American Citizens first!? That’s the end of that race!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 28, 2019
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